The history of man is very much a history of imagination. The human imagination is what has allowed our success as a species. Each new place explored, every bold step taken and every invention discovered required first an equally bold step of creative vision.
The earliest evidence of human creativity pre-date that of recorded history itself. From simple paintings on a cave wall to the oral tradition of passing down tales of wonder and heroic deeds from one generation to the next. From that very moment when a human being wrote his name on a piece of parchment to that day Winter day in 1439 when the first piece of paper passed through a printing press.
The way we tell stories and the technologies we use to convey them have changed drastically over the millennia but the core emotional reasons behind telling those stories remains the same, which is to have experiences beyond the confines offered by of our mortal limitations. We create our characters and the worlds they inhabit as a way to live vicariously though these characters.
That desire to have experiences beyond the ones available in our own are literally hard coded as deeply as our DNA. What else is the act of dreaming but an unconscious way to simulate experiences beyond our own lives. Yet despite all the advances in story telling and technology provided by the advent of motion picture, video games, and theater, it continues to be the book that is second only to our dreams in spurring our imaginations. Books allow us to deeply delve into other worlds and they are the most insightful way to experience and share our stories and the story of humanity.
When this thirst for knowledge and creative expression integral to being human is connected to revolutionary and disruptive changes happening in the field of computing, a picture begins to immerse. Advances are occurring in disparate technological fields which may at first blush seem completely separate having no obvious connection.
Some of technologies such as deep learning and machine learning have until now been solely the domain of well funded research groups, multinational companies, and supercomputers.
Machine learning and deep learning technologies such as those spearheaded by Google Inc. and IBM through their Watson® computer recently played successive games of Jeopardy and won against some of those most talented human players in the world.
This was once thought unthinkable although it was once equally unthinkable that a computer would win a game of checkers against a human opponent. Less than 10 years later Gary Kasparov, the world's champion lost a game of chess against IBM's Deep Blue®.
Machine learning technologies have a goal of receiving disparate sources of information and aggregating those sources, analyzing them to gain broad insights that can be used in a multitude of ways. They have the ability to learn and improve on their ability without the direct aid of a human operator and so can make better conclusions about the input they are given.
Other blooming and quickly advancing technologies such as “Virtual Reality” were once expected to spearhead the computing revolution only to be seen as a technological flop of the late 20th century. Since that time however many of the core technologies required for realistic immersive experiences have continued to advance unabated. Computing power has seen dramatic increases year after year. Display technologies have advanced in both their definition and the ability for screens to be miniaturized.
Input devices such as head tracking technologies have gained a degree of accuracy and a lack of latency and the price of all these technologies are finally reaching a price point which is accessible for average consumers.
Other supposedly unrelated base technologies are advancing at a rapid pace. Wearable tracking devices, originally created to track a user's daily fitness habits are already developing to become health tracking devices which monitor an array of bodily signs from a user's heart rhythms to skin resistance providing medical doctors a complete insight into a person's current health state.
EEG headbands that track brainwave states, movement tracking technologies such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, barometers and GPS receivers, multi touch sensors and any number of other sensing technologies have grown tiny enough to fit in a cell phone, all in the course of just a few years.
Light tracking and camera motion tracking systems are just starting to scratch the surface of their applicability to video gaming. Already available to consumers in forms such as the PlayStation Camera and Kinect camera use both the visible and invisible spectrum of light to track out movements and physical actions and even our facial expressions.
Some of these technologies are already seeing broad adoption in the daily lives of consumers, others have yet to see mass adoption but will in the short term start to make head ways into our everyday lives.